At Odds on the Church Scandal

Pope Francis’s new commission to protect minors got off to a candid start by warning that the scandal of pedophile priests has been a worldwide problem and requires reforms that hold diocesan leaders accountable. “In many people’s minds, it is an American problem, an Irish problem or a German problem,” Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston, a member of the commission, said after its first meeting in Rome last week. “The church has to face it is everywhere in the world.”

This realism about the challenge ahead was in sharp contrast to the defense of the church’s record offered a few days later when a Vatican delegation in Geneva faced a second United Nations panel, the first having sharply criticized the church for evading the problem and failing to uphold the international treaty against torture. “We must not be fossilized in the past,” Archbishop Silvano Tomasi declared, as if the scandal and cover-ups were fading into history. He insisted that the church was well on its way to “cleaning house,” and offered the Vatican’s tally of 848 priests dismissed for sexual abuse of minors in a decade and 2,572 others disciplined. The numbers just underlined the scope of the scandal and the belated attempts to address it. And his argument that the torture treaty applies only in the confines of the Vatican defies logic.

Missing from the tally was the complicit role of diocesan prelates. Cardinal O’Malley said the commission wants “clear and effective protocols” for holding diocesan leaders accountable so they cannot again duck their obligations to civil authorities. Archbishop Tomasi says church policy now is to report “credible accusations” to police. But it is far from reassuring that while the Italian bishops’ conference recently released guidelines to protect minors, it insisted it had no legal obligation to report offenses to police. It is this kind of high-handedness toward civil authority that helped perpetuate the scandal.

Pope Francis says the church has done an effective job facing the scandal. He would be wise to heed the critiques and recommendations his commission is promising.